These kinds of tantrums were common with Brandon.
Everything was always somebody else’s fault. The waiter. Traffic. His boss. Me. The only difference this time was that he dragged his parents into it and assumed I’d clean up the mess again.
I let him scream for almost a full minute from that airport terminal before finally saying, “Check your email.”
Then I hung up.
Earlier that morning, before their flight even boarded for Cancun, I’d already called the credit card company, frozen every joint account, and emailed divorce paperwork to my attorney.
Not because of the trip itself.
Because Brandon stole my platinum card from my work bag after I explicitly told him we could not afford a luxury vacation for his parents. Our mortgage was already two months behind and I’d just pulled money from savings to cover our daughter’s asthma medication.
Meanwhile his mother kept posting Facebook photos calling the airport lounge “much needed family healing time.”
About twenty minutes after I hung up, my mother-in-law called crying hysterically saying airport security was involved because Brandon’s card kept declining at the resort transfer desk. Apparently he’d also used my card number to hold the hotel reservation without telling anybody.
Then Brandon texted me something that changed everything.
He wrote, “If you ruin this trip, I’ll tell Nicole what happened in Dallas.”
Nicole is my younger sister.
I honestly stared at that message for a full minute because Brandon went to Dallas alone last spring for a “sales conference.”
I called Nicole immediately.
Turns out Brandon had been secretly messaging her for months afterward. Flirting. Complaining about me. Asking her to meet him for drinks when he was “working late.” She never told me because she blocked him and assumed he was drunk and embarrassed.
The funniest part was my mother-in-law still trying to threaten me later that night from the airport hotel lobby.
Until Brandon got arrested at Dallas-Fort Worth during their layover home after airport police responded to him screaming at the airline desk over four canceled tickets and an unpaid baggage balance of $1,842.